Electronic devices, including portable electronic devices, have gained widespread use and can provide a variety of functions including, for example, telephonic, electronic messaging and other personal information manager (PIM) application functions. Portable electronic devices can include several types of devices including mobile stations such as simple cellular telephones, smart telephones, wireless PDAs, and laptop computers with wireless 802.11 or Bluetooth capabilities. These devices run on a wide variety of networks from data-only networks such as Mobitex and DataTAC to complex voice and data networks such as GSM/GPRS, CDMA, EDGE, UMTS and CDMA2000 networks.
Devices such as PDAs or smart telephones are generally intended for handheld use and ease of portability. Smaller devices are generally desirable for portability. Touch screen devices constructed of a display, such as a liquid crystal display, with a touch-sensitive overlay are useful on such handheld devices as such handheld devices are small and are therefore limited in space available for user input and output devices. Further, the screen content on the touch screen devices can be modified depending on the functions and operations being performed.
These devices suffer from disadvantages, however. For example, with decreasing size of electronic devices, user-selectable features such as buttons displayed on the touch screen display of the portable electronic device are limited in size. When displaying a number of user-selectable features such as buttons of a virtual keyboard, user selection becomes difficult as the buttons are small and the placement of the user's finger can be inexact. Thus, selection errors may be made as a result of target inaccuracy and a lack of a touch feedback.
Improvements in portable electronic devices having touch screen displays are therefore desirable.